It's an okay, but frankly tedious game. The core gameplay loop is that you run around infecting cells, which is fine enough, but does get boring after a while. The level design is trouble at times, such as the lymph channel level being particularly long without much variation other than that you're being chased by an oversized lymphocyte, and some of the levels can be frustrating, especially if you're spending time running from neutrophils.
With the exception of the blood vessel and lymph node levels, there isn't actually all that much variation in the gameplay. It mostly boils down to clonespam (because you can't hurt the bosses yourself), with the lone exception of the giant multinucleated cell, where it was both clonespam and luring it around to the acid bubbles.
Speaking of bubbles, most of the bonuses aren't actually all that helpful. The only one you encounter on the typical levels are DNA bonuses, but they only offer a relatively small amount (25), equivalent to a cell or two, and by the time that you start encountering more of them, there are so many cells that they're almost completely meaningless, offering only marginal benefits, if any.
When I played, the first level/world had a bit of a bug where the clones would get caught in the stasis bubbles, and become inactive, rendering them largely useless, which is not ideal, as these levels are often pre-upgrade, and you spend a lot of time running around enemies to do all the work yourself.
2-1 (Stem cells) is incredibly tedious, being largely pre-upgrade, so it is just basically just a walking simulator. And as you are not able to go back and edit your loadout if you're stuck with something troublesome (only retry), the only way to do anything is to bear it and continue regardless.
And if you do get clones, you cannot control them. They behave according to their own AI, and are also the only method of attacking bosses. So if they do mill around, there's rather little that you can do to make them behave, or tell them to go attack the boss, rather than chase after cells their compatriots are infecting, or fly off to the edges of the level because their target got snagged by someone else.
The settings and controller compatibility are very spotty. Setting changes reset upon each game launch/do not persist during shutdown. For controllers, you only get motion controls on the left stick. It is not possible to navigate the menu or any of the screens with just the controller, so you will need a keyboard and mouse to use those.
I wouldn't really recommend that people go out and buy/play it. It's a fun thing to doddle around with for an hour or two, but I honestly don't believe that the gameplay changes all that much past the bacteriophage levels, and the prospect of repeating more of the same is daunting enough that I'm not convinced that I would pick the game up again, even for the half-price that I got it for, having bought it on sale.
At the end of the day, it feels and plays a bit like a mobile game in both controls and styling, for better and worse. Raging Rabbit could do well to put it on the app store and see how it goes, but it also means that there are trade-offs that affect how the game plays on a computer, and just like a mobile game, you might just pick it up once or twice, or if you're really bored and have absolutely nothing else to do for an hour or two, but that's about it.
